Digimon Xros Wars: Age of the Time War
by Zero Slash One
Summary: Everything's gone to Hell in a handbasket. Xros Wars Rewrite, Cosmic Horror, multi-dimensional Time War in progress. Like, feel free to read. Don't like, feel free to read.


**This story is written for the Gift Fic challenge on the Digimon Fanfiction Challenge Forum; the core story is the Digimon Multiverse being plunged into the madness of a 'Time War' or a 'War in Heaven', as in the Doctor Who style cosmic cataclysm.**

**As such, it will feature issues of controversy: Trivialized mass deaths numberings in the billions, weapons/entities that verge on conceptually horrific and/or bewildering, subjects that might prove affronting to one's sensibilities (sibling incest for this chapter alone), all the relative staples of a Cosmic Horror Story.**

**I am no fan of the nonsensical rebuttal 'Don't Like Don't Read', but in this case, I will remind anyone who dislike the subject matters at play in this story that electing not to heed this warning is entirely one's own doing.  
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**Naturally, any form of feedback is welcome, though I would ask that it not be because insufficient warning was provided.**

**Without further ado, enjoy this unadulterated Dark Fic to the fullest.**

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><p>To understand a Time War, one would have to examine its effects: A single revisited event had, more often than not, the consequence of 'splintering' time, into a number of alternate realities. A... suitable visual metaphor would be a spider-web that continually gained new threads that connected to pre-existing pathways in obtuse angles.<p>

While that particular metaphor was somewhat self-contradicting, in that the term 'splintering' implied the core process of alternate timelines branching off of Space-Time events to be somewhat-slash-somehow harmful to the wider spacetime continuum, whereas the term 'spider-web' implied the addition of new strands to be a natural occurrence by the 'spider' at the heart of the 'web', such was merely a consequence of translating multi-dimensional concepts into single-dimensional language.

To continue the metaphor of time as a spider-web, the Time War caused such 'strands' of new timelines to form 'instantly' _(single-dimensional temporal terms as 'earlier', 'later' and 'now' were not relevant when there were multiple concurrent 'earliers'/'laters'/'nows'). _Within these new timelines, history explored new potential lives of those within the divergent realities.

In one realized timeline, the warrior siblings Mervamon and Ignitemon joined a team of Zone-wandering heroes known as the Fusion Fighters to restore peace and order, and repair their Digital World. They never learnt of the Time War, even as a fleeing Nightmare Child hid inside them both.

In one realized timeline, the warrior siblings had been dragged, fighting and bleeding, into the Time War before they could join either the Fusion Fighters or the Bagra Army. Their pasts and presents and futures quaked around them: Amid the spatio-temporal chaos, incestuous dalliances provided a small measure of distractive comfort and boundless worry that she fell pregnant because of them.

In one realized timeline, Mervamon had been forced to slay her brother after his refusal to leave the Bagra Army. An unanticipated vampire attack left them both undead. Time passed for them, and they eventually became rampaging mass murderers. Decades and centuries passed, and as they continued to drink blood and consume flesh, what little remained of their former selves whittled away. They joined the legions of eldritch abominations and Lovecraftian monstrosities that were the Mid-Level powers of the Time War.

That term, incidentally, was something that all_ true _combatants in this War agreed: There were Low-Level combatants, and there were Mid-Level combatants, and there were High-Level combatants. This measuring system had even formed the basis for a saying: If you need to ask where you rate, you're Low-Level.

But to return to the matter of the 'spider-web' metaphor: Just as certain portions of a spider-web could _(under highly improbable circumstances) _become congested lumps from countless strands intersecting at exactly the same spot, so too did the infinitely spawned timelines often/occasionally intersect at one specific space-time event. Not necessarily a small skirmish or a war claiming billions of lives from across the dimensions, but not necessarily _not _those kinds of events.

When such spatio-temporal intersection occurred, there was always a chance that the whole tangled mesh of timelines weighed down too heavy on spacetime. So it happened that spacetime itself collapsed under the strain, leaving a gaping 'hole' in spacetime where/when the collapse had occurred. These 'holes' could be of any size, but never larger than a galaxy nor longer than a few thousand years.

Such was a truth of a Time War: Time and Space were as much victims as the millions who died waging the battles_ (really, the list of casualties was_ Quite Long,_ even without factoring in the multiple methods of death for alternate iterations of the combatants)._

_..._

Somewhere, sometime, a battle was waged. Actually, it held true for pretty much everywhen and everywhere in a Time War, but eh.

The broadsword was buried into the Arresterdramon. It was retracted immediately after, with greenish blood coating it. The dragon collapsed from the grievous wound that it had been dealt, and dissolved into incoherent particles of data.

Out of the corner of her eye, Mervamon spotted a few more Strikedramon charging towards her and swung her blade forcefully. The stomachs of two were sliced open, and they in turn decompiled, and the others were likewise disposed of quickly and mercilessly.

Amidst the fierce fighting, the warrior found time to ponder about her situation. She noted that she had lost sight of Ignitemon during the Church's invasion: It did not escape her that he might well be dead, but still she prayed for his survival. She paused, driving her blade through the stomach of an Arresterdramon.

Though with only the senses of a human, she was virtually stumbling blind in a war stretching through infinity and beyond eternity: The current battle was relatively insignificant, occurring concurrently in two timelines. It added very little to the tangled mess of the whole, but served to entrench Mervamon and Ignitemon deeper still in the conflicts of possibility.

In both dimensions, the slaughter proceeded much the same: Exactly 1273 adherents of the Latterday Church of Sun=Millenniummon met their deaths, either at Mervamon's Olympia Kai or Ignitemon's chakram. A small section of two parallel Dragon Lands were secured, but it hardly mattered.

In one version of reality, this was the end of it; the warrior siblings returned to the Olympus XII base to seek the next conflict. In the other, the conflict was renewed and escalated by the arrival of The Gone.

Far from the two and the multitude of corpses, the hordes of could-have-been and never-happened appeared, too substantial to appear like the ghosts they were. Friends, family, lovers, children, enemies, lords, subjects: All were assembled with the same goal, to kill all that lived for no better reason than _that _it lived.

The things that never happened did not rush to the slaughter: They instead strolled leisurely across the bloodsoaked wasteland like it was a literal walk in the park. From the bird's-eye perspective, the hordes formed rings around the two of them, slowly closing on their prey.

Mervamon grumbled throatily when she noticed the approaching enemies. "Prepare for combat," she called out to her brother. Ignitemon nodded, unseen to her, and charged towards his foes.

In mere moments, the divide between them was bridged. "Fath-" was all that one of them, a young girl, could utter before a stab of his chakram silenced her. The girl fell, bleeding profusely.

With a single, calculated motion, three more of them were wounded by the blades. Ignitemon knew that it wouldn't kill them - The Gone were creatures of chronology rather than biology - but it would delay them for the duration.

Brief glances at the children wandering and dying around him sickened him - reminded him of the awful things Mervamon and him had committed for the sake of momentary distraction from the Time War - but he did not hesitate merely due to their dying shambles.

The fighting continued literally without end. The manifestated bodies of The Gone entity possessed neither the strength nor skill to cause them; it seemed that the eldritch abomination would rather toy with them than actually fight them. Neither of them sustained even meager injuries in waging this battle.

In truth, it did not matter however they fought for survival: Their existences would be swallowed 'when' the constant timetravel and spatiotemporal manipulations and multi-dimensional warfare made it a logical impossibility that they had ever been born.

That was, of course, for whatever time they had been subjected to the surreal cycle of being excised from all space and time, then woven back in, then excised again again, then woven in again, then excised again.

Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in. Excised out. Woven in.

Already, some other time-active force had caused their past to never have occurred. Of course, that applied only to the versions of Mervamon and Ignitemon that would actually be affected by the spatiotemporal tidefall: Those sufficiently far removed from the region of spacetime that was being twisted around would, logically, not be affected.

Indeed, several loops of that cycle had already occurred, and it might seem comical that the warrior siblings were blinking in and out of reality at random intervals in that hour.

Twenty minutes in, they were removed altogether from the whole of time and space. Fifteen minutes in, they returned, blissfully unaware of the shifts and shudders in what they perceived of reality, to wage the skirmish once more. All the while, The Gone's forces remained present there, even when it made no sense.

Each time, the details and specifics of their situation were subtly different. A somewhat suitable analogy would be the repair of a broken vase: There would always be signs of breaking and repair in the wake of the event. Of course, from a point of view in the three spatial dimensions, the signs would be above one's scope to see.

On the battlefield where and when the warrior siblings currently were, reality itself shuddered in response to what had occurred immediately before. It was not a mere physical thing, more a metaphysical entity reacting to a physical event.

Around them, the countless children that The Gone had leveled at them disappeared completely. Not only that, but the temporal forces generated by the core event, infinite possibilities of the futures consolidating into a singular reality.

Left to themselves in the ravaged forest, the two Generals reflected on what had just occurred. The ten-foot-tall warrior turned to the seven-foot-tall warrior. The two exchanged a heavy look that communicated clearly that this matter should not be delayed.

Her arms moved up to remove her ornate piece of headgear. He did likewise, revealing his whole head and his two eyes which were larger than those of an ordinary human.

"Ignitemon," she began. Her voice was slightly throaty and the word sounded strained to even utter.

Before any further words could be exchanged, reality itself collapsed, again, as it caught up with the paradox of their continued existences. Such was the nature of a Time War: Everything happened, all at once, and sanity went flying out the nearest gash in the skin of spacetime.


End file.
